Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

'Well, first thing, zummun 'ad better get 'im out o' that there tree.'

Rough hands reach up to me, fasten on my ankles and pull. 'All right, all right,' I cry, 'I'm coming.'

And because I'm a touch frightened I forget to deepen my voice.

"E only be a young un from the sound of it.'

Once on the ground the nearest gets hold of my cowl and pulls it back while two more pinion my elbows to my sides.

'Here's a thing, then. Zumman get a light on 'im, let us see 'im proper.'

They have much to admire and find strange. First there is my head, once shaven but now with an all-over pelt of hennaed black, about half an inch long and no tonsure, then my full but tended eyebrows, also grown back, my straight nose, full lips and rounded chin. My eyes like deep mountain pools. My skin the colour of copper exposed to the air just as it begins to brown and lose its golden look. One of the women seizes my hand and turns it beneath the flickering light. 'This be no man's hand,' she says. 'This be a woman's and a lady's at that.'

'An' this be no friar's mantle,' another says, 'wrong colour and cut, and the material too fine.'

'She got boobies too,' one of the two holding me from behind calls out, after having a quick squeeze with her free hand.

At that, the one holding my hand, who was the first to see me, lets go and pulls up the hem of my gown, all the way, as far as the belt will allow.

'Yers,' she says, 'that's no friar nor monk. That's a hen.' Gerroff,' says I, and, looking over her shoulder and seeing curious children as well as men gathering round, one of whom lowers a torch to illuminate my lower half, she does indeed pull down the skirt of my robe. 'Zorree,' she whispers, almost in my ear, and I note a certain female companionship..I sense that I have one quality at least that has provoked a touch of sympathy. I feel better for it.

It is now clear to me that what I have been walking through during the day is the corridor linking winter to spring, the first stirrings of the new season having been beneath my feet and around me in the sights and sounds of the woods. These people, too, were well aware that a threshold had been reached and that the deities that control such things might well need a ritual shove to get us all across. Deities? Not the Christian godling and his mother and his father in heaven but the goddesses and gods who are worshipped here and everywhere, but in many parts are now hidden away like-toys we are supposed to have grown out of. Except for these people, and many more across the world, it's not a whipping you get if you're discovered, but the rack, the thumbscrews and a burning. Hence their fear of me when they took me for a friar.

Back home, girls go out into the fields, make heaps of flowers and place on them images of Parvati and Shiva. In play they perform a marriage ceremony between the goddess and the god: it is all done as a childish ritual, a game, but still carries, like the ancient odour one smells when opening a long-closed chest, the survival of something far more powerful from the times when the gods walked among us, something which resembles what I am now caught up in, in darkest Ingerlond.

Meanwhile, a debate continues amongst these villagers as to what should be done with me. The older men are all for cutting my throat, though one or two of the younger ones suggest that they should 'give me one' first. However, the women are generally against this for, as an older lady points out, if I am a religious then I must be a Clare, by which she means. I later learn, a member of the sister order of the Franciscans. It seems they are the only females who venture away from their convents, and when they do it is to bring succour and charity to the poor and ill. However, if I am not a Clare, then what am I? It would be foolish to harm me before discovering what the consequences may be.

By now we are all in the large barn, which has an earth floor, piles of dry grass or hay round the sides and heaps of grain. As the elders continue to argue, the rest are clearly preparing for a feast. The musicians, for want of a better word, have gathered at the far end opposite the big double doors, their drums, pipes and stringed instruments around them. There are a few tootles on the pipes and a bagpipe sets up a drone; one of the men rattles a box, filled, I imagine, with dried peas, another begins to beat a primitive drum, a skin pulled tight over a clay pot, with the palms of his hands, and so on. Some trestle tables are set up and a big barrel with a leaky bung is hefted up by six strong men and placed on one. Smoke, laden with the odour of burning meat, drifts in from an adjoining lean-to stable.

I am still held by the arms in a corner furthest from tin-door and behind the band. The women are close around me and some of the men looking curiously over their shoulders, when at last the one who first found me, whom the others call Erica, cries, 'Only Greasy Joan will know, she's the one, she'll know.'

'You're right,' cries another.

'But who will dare to wake her up?' a third asks. 'She'll give them cramps and stitches for a fortnight.'

'She ought to be here. She never misses a Bride's Day. she never misses the Bridget Feast.'

'But nor 'as she ever slept without food or drink for a month either.'

'Go on, get her up. An' if it kills her, well, good riddance, she's lived long enough, that's for sure."

And three or four melt away into the smoke that's now swirling more thickly than ever. It smells green, as if they're trying to cook on fresh-cut wood rather than charcoal.

Presently they're hack with a very old woman half carried, half supported between them. Because the old crones, the wise old women of Vijayanagara are usually so, I had expected her to be thin, scrawny, a bundle of bones, but this old lady, although, so they say, she has fasted a month, is fat with lolloping breasts beneath her gown, a belly like a barrel, huge thighs, and ankles swollen like puddings packed in the stomachs of sheep. She is also bald and toothless, so only her cheeks look thin. She's grumbling and cursing through her gums, uttering obscenities worse than any I have yet heard, even here in Ingerlond.

They plant her in front of me and she gazes at me from eyes that look left and right at the same time, up and down, and one is misty blue, the other pale green. She has a wart on one cheek with four black hairs growing out of it, and big dewlaps, like a great white-water buffalo's, which quiver and shake when she speaks or moves her head. In an ambience already rich with foetid odours, her own stale exhalations, the smells of flesh tired and unwashed, old piss and shit, make a cloud around her.

'Come on, Greasy, tell us who she is,' they call. 'Is she a witch? Takes one to know one…' and so forth.

She peers at me, shifts to one side then the other, reaches out a podgy hand, looks more like a long-teated cow's udder than a hand, and touches my wrist. Then she cackles, a hard, rattly sound, and hisses too, like an angry goose, showering us all with spittle and revealing teeth small, yellow and broken. At last the fit leaves her, and she almost shrinks in front of me, seems to sink a little.

'Yer fools, y' know, yer all bloody fools. Can't y' see her skin, how dark it is, can't y' see her beauty, the glow about her? That I should live, live to see this day, this night. Well. I'm blest after all. At the end of me life I'm blest.'

'Oh, come on, Granny Greasy, don't mess about, tell us who she is,' they cry.

'Well, then, I will. This here is none less than Mary Gypsy, Mary of Egypt, Marry Gyp hersel'! Miriam Marina. She'll dance for you, if you ask her nicely, and if she don't like you she'll blast your wombs with warts and fill your cunts with teeth.' Then her voice drops and she speaks to me alone. 'Forgive me. Lady, it's your sister loves me now, your sister and my mother, old Hecate, but truly I loved you once."